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    Little Family, Big Values: Lessons in Love, Respect, and Understanding for Families of Any Size
    Little Family, Big Values: Lessons in Love, Respect, and Understanding for Families of Any Size
    Little Family, Big Values: Lessons in Love, Respect, and Understanding for Families of Any Size
    Ebook191 pages2 hours

    Little Family, Big Values: Lessons in Love, Respect, and Understanding for Families of Any Size

    By The Roloff Family and Tracy Sumner

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the stars of TLC's critically acclaimed reality show Little People, Big World comes heartfelt advice to help today's families overcome life's obstacles together and grow closer in the process.

    The Roloffs are no ordinary family. Parents Matt and Amy are little people raising four children: a pair of teenage twins, Jeremy and Zachary, one of whom is average size and one who is little; preteen daughter, Molly; and the youngest, Jacob. Being part of this unique family -- where something as simple as shopping for back-to-school clothing can be a real challenge -- has presented no shortage of struggles, and in Little Family, Big Values the Roloffs share the values that have helped them and become the cornerstone of their bond.

    Through family stories, each member of the family weighs in on the importance of these values in their life and the lessons -- sometimes hard -- they've learned in doing their best to live by them:

    • Amy tells of the decision she made, out of love for her family, to put her career as a teacher on hold and become a stay-at-home mom.
    • Matt shares how keeping faith that God has a plan for him has helped him tackle any family setbacks with confidence.
    • Jeremy describes the respect he feels for his brother Zach when he sees him on the soccer field giving players twice his size a run for their money.
    • Zachary recognizes his siblings' love for him when they willingly sacrifice a Christmas at home to be with him at the hospital for surgery.
    • Matt's mother, Peggy, reveals how his perseverance with a boyhood paper route helped him become the successful businessman he is today.


    In these and other inspiring stories, the Roloffs show us why they've become such a beloved American family and offer advice on how all families can put these values into practice to achieve a greater level of love, respect, and understanding -- no matter what their size.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTouchstone
    Release dateApr 30, 2007
    ISBN9781416561866
    Little Family, Big Values: Lessons in Love, Respect, and Understanding for Families of Any Size
    Author

    The Roloff Family

    The Roloff Family lives on Roloff Farms, just outside Portland, Oregon. They can be seen on the TLC television show Little People, Big World.

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    • 2/5
      The book was definitely a quick-read, and I would surmise even a quicker-write.My sister, Sherilyn, knows of my fascination with the Roloff family and bought me this book for my birthday this Summer. Jess and I are well into enjoying this new Season of the “Little People, Big World” television series with the Roloffs on TLC.The book is great! Written partly by each member of the Roloff family, minus youngest-Jacob. The Roloffs share the values their family holds near and dear and shares from experience how defending those values has put them in the place they are today. There’s some great insight into their family within the pages of the book and some great words of wisdom.I enjoyed most the chapter on the Roloff’s value of Faith. I read a clear statement of the Faith that Matt and Amy have in the One True God and salvation through Jesus Christ that I have received mere glimpses of through the television series. Jeremy, one of their twins talks about the importance that Faith has played in the family’s lifestyle, too.The reason I felt it was a quick-write is because of an obvious mistake in which Zach was referred to as Jeremy in one of the first chapters.

    Book preview

    Little Family, Big Values - The Roloff Family

    Introduction

    The Meaning of Roloff Family Values

    IF YOU WERE TO travel west out of Portland, Oregon, and through some beautiful, gently rolling hills, you might find yourself on a thirty-four-acre farm called Roloff Farms.

    That is our home and the home of our four children as well as an assortment of animals we keep as pets or livestock. It’s also the site of a complete three-quarters-scale western town, a pirate ship on a pond, a three-story tree house, an almost full-sized medieval castle, a big pumpkin patch, one of the biggest zip lines in North America, and other projects we’ve either completed or have on the drawing board.

    If you’ve had a chance to see the Learning Channel’s reality television show Little People, Big World, then you have at least a little bit of a picture of what the farm looks like—and what we, the family living on it, look like too. You know that my wife, Amy, and I are little people—more commonly referred to as individuals with dwarfism—living a busy life of work, running our home and farm, and most important, raising our children.

    One of the many results of doing the show is that we receive literally thousands of viewer e-mails every week asking us everything from what it’s like to be small in a tall world to what kind of reactions we get from people when they first see us. But the question we’re asked most often is what makes our family tick, how our mutual love, respect, and understanding have brought us beyond our differences to form a powerful family bond.

    Those values are what this book is all about.

    Our family—as varied as it is—works so well because Amy and I have had instilled in us by loving parents on both sides a set of family values, which we’ve built on and in turn instilled in our own kids. As a result, we now have our own set of family values, which we’ll get into. Before we launch into our individual and collective beliefs, I’d like to introduce myself and my family for those who haven’t come to know us through the show Little People, Big World.

    The Story of Our Family

    I was born a diastrophic dwarf, meaning that I am not only short in height—just over four feet—but I also have severe problems in my legs, knees, hips, shoulders, arms, and the rest of my body. My joints, my hands, and my feet are all visibly deformed. The list goes on and on.

    All these physical problems led to a childhood spent in hospitals, either receiving corrective surgeries (some of which helped, some of which didn’t) or recovering from them. In addition to those hospital stays (nearly two years combined), I spent more months than my family can count at home in braces and casts and recovering from my many surgeries. The physical problems have also led to a situation where it is impossible for me to stand up straight or walk without the aid of crutches.

    Amy is also a little person, but her condition is different from mine and not nearly as severe. Her genetic condition is known in medical terms as achondroplasia, which is another cause of dwarfism but one that doesn’t carry with it nearly as many of the complications as I’ve dealt with all my life. For the most part, Amy physically leads a fairly normal life in which she is active and even coaches our son’s youth soccer team. For several years, she held the difficult but rewarding job of being a stay-at-home mom. However, in the past few years she has started working outside the home—part-time for a local youth soccer club and also as a preschool teacher.

    We have been married for nineteen years, and we are the proud, happy parents of four children, the oldest of which are our twin boys, Zachary and Jeremy, who were born in 1990. We also have a daughter named Molly, who was born in 1993, and another son named Jacob, who was born in 1996.

    Now, we know the question most people who don’t know us would ask, and the answer is No, not all of our children have dwarfism. While dwarfism of all kinds is a genetic condition that can and does run in families (for example, my brother Sam is also a little person), little people are very often the parents of average-sized children, and we have three of our own.

    Our son Zachary, who is two feet shorter than his twin brother, Jeremy, is the third little person in our family, making it a 3–3 tie between little people and average-sized people in our home. Zach’s condition is the same as Amy’s, meaning that he is relatively healthy.

    The other two members of our family appearing on the show are my parents, Ron and Peggy Roloff, who have also contributed some of their thoughts to this book. As you will see as you read on, my parents are remarkable people.

    My father is a tough but tender ex-Marine who instilled in me many of the values we’ve listed in this book. He is a man of incredible compassion, strength, and faith who knows what he believes in and why he believes it. He is also the perfect complement to Mom, who came from a background of comfort and ease only to take on the incredibly difficult job of raising four children, three of whom during certain points in their young lives required almost constant care and attention. Mom is a sweet but strong woman who could offer an encouraging smile while at the same time offering challenging words for children who needed to be strong to endure the pain of many major surgeries and countless hours of excruciating recovery and

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